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Reification, Agency and the Discourse on Identity and Difference

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Reification, Agency and the Discourse on Identity and Difference PINS, 2017, 53, 1 – 29, http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-8708/2017/n53a1 Writing outside history: Reification, agency and the discourse on identity and difference Abstract Raphael Mackintosh1 The recent debates about the transformation, or & Wahbie Long decolonization, of higher education in South Africa have Department of Psychology underscored the continuing salience of “identity” in University of Cape Town post-apartheid political discourse. Disillusioned with the Rondebosch 7700 token equality of liberal politics, student-led movements now demand that their manifestos be granted legitimacy Keywords precisely on particularistic grounds. With the aim of political identity, agency, understanding what conception of social change these ontology, social change, demands entail, this archival study analyzes how political decolonization, reification, identity and agency have been constructed in contemporary metapsychology South African academic discourse. More specifically, this study identifies the different kinds of ontological and epistemological presuppositions that particular uses of language are necessarily committed to, and therefore necessarily limited by (both politically and conceptually). Utilizing Scopus, a bibliographic database, the five most relevant and highly cited articles were selected and subsequently analyzed using the logical rules governing both predicate ascription and presupposition. Two main uses of language were isolated based on common sets of presuppositions: 1) A non-human ontology of agents, and 2) Agency as a property of antecedently given identities. Each use of language was found to comprise two further subcategories respectively: 1.1) Psychological agencies, 1.2) External agencies; and 2.1) Realist view of political identity, 2.2) Constructivist view of political identity. The results of the data analysis suggest that the two main uses of language are mutually reinforcing. Taken together, they appear to entail an account of social change that, via the linguistic obfuscation and reification of human agency, is in 1 This article is based on research conducted by Raphael Mackintosh, and supervised by Wahbie Long. 1 | PINS [Psychology in Society] 53 • 2017 fact immanent to the existing socio-political order itself. It is suggested that future research on political identity and agency will require a trans-disciplinary approach concerned with explaining manifest social antagonisms (e.g. class oppression; institutional racism; Islamophobia) in terms of the global historical and material conditions within which they are located. Introduction Over the last two years, the impassioned set of debates taking place across South African universities have since drawn sharp attention to certain matters of social justice and inequality affecting higher education in South Africa; white privilege, black pain and the post-apartheid requisite for decolonized knowledge production expressing the vox populi in most cases (Long, 2015). The renewed discourse on transformation, originating within student-led movements such as Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), has increasingly been shaped by what Taylor coined as the “politics of recognition”: a discourse that grants political legitimacy to individuals and groups on the sociohistorical basis of their identities (Taylor, 1994: 25). Owing to its hierarchical demarcation of social identities (as defined by their relative sociohistorical privilege), one consequence of any politics of identity-recognition is a scepticism regarding the exercise of agency beyond the distinct, and relative borders of identity per se e.g. the ethically questionable involvement of white people in anti-racist struggles (Hook, 2011). Given that, as Long (2015) notes, current student manifestos are drawing substantially, albeit selectively, from history’s revolutionary intelligentsia, there remains a need to redirect our analytic curiosity toward the present historical moment in order that the spotlight be shone on the role of contemporary South African academics in shaping this particular discourse. Notwithstanding the arguments occurring at the already seasoned level of sociopolitical theory, considerably less attention has been paid to the philosophical and conceptual relationships between identity, agency and political life upon which the current discourse on transformation necessarily depends upon for its cogency. The literature on political identity and its relationship to both individual and group agency is theoretically complex. I therefore organized its content by utilizing what Kaniki (1999: 19) calls a thematic review: “a review structured around different themes or perspectives in the literature, often focusing on the debates between different ‘schools’.” My primary interest in this review concerns the theoretical and philosophical relationships between “identity” and “agency” within political life. The recent historical importance of identity in politics Identities, both personal and social, are nowadays recognized as fundamentally important aspects of all social and political inquiry (Frueh, 2003; McQueen, 2015). However, there is a split in academic consensus between those who lament the PINS [Psychology in Society] 53 • 2017 | 2 commodification of identity (i.e. when systemic problems are recast using identity as the primary site of social antagonism), and those who regard the relevance of identity as indispensable to political struggle (Sharansky, 2008). One example of the latter opinion was second wave feminism which, during the second half of the 20th century, reacted to the homogenizing effects that pre-identitarian forms of liberal culture had had on previously marginalized social groups (Taylor, 1994). Through what Hegel famously coined as “the struggle for recognition” – i.e. the reclamation of, and demand for, social recognition – the politicization of identity has since become a crucial part of the demands of historically oppressed groups (Heyes, 2014, para. 10). As this pattern indirectly shows, the normative and political power of one’s social identity depends upon particular descriptive presuppositions of the human subject (Frueh, 2003). This raises philosophical questions about the nature and scope of human agency, and the sociality and construction of identity. In many cases, what prima facie appear to be moral incompatibilities between different political theories of the subject, are instead a product of their distinct ontological assumptions regarding human nature itself (Frueh, 2003). The ontological status of the subject, identity & agency There are two major views about the ontological status of the human subject in Western history, the second of which found widespread acceptance during the 20th and 21st century in existentialist, psychoanalytic, feminist and post-structuralist theories of political identity (Häkli & Kallio, 2014). The first view originates from the thought of two Western philosophers, namely Rousseau and Kant (Taylor, 1994). Inspired largely by Rousseau’s writing, the notion of self-authenticity as an inner moral process of following the voice of nature began to form an essential part of individual identity (Ansell-Pearson, 1991; Taylor, 1994). The autonomous, self-sufficient and “bounded” self – free from any social or historical constraints – became central to liberal (Western) thought by the early 19th century (Ansell-Pearson, 1991: 273). Similarly, Kant insisted that political life must always pay homage to the primacy of the rational individual, the ontological status of which is both pre-social and universally assumed (Ansell-Pearson, 1991; McQueen, 2015). Unsurprisingly, this liberal conception of the self has been criticized as a mere formalistic and metaphysical abstraction that “purchases moral autonomy … at the cost of excluding all historical and psychological determination” (Ansell-Pearson, 1991: 274). Against the atomistic view of the pre-social self, there emerged a profoundly intersubjective conception of selfhood (Häkli & Kallio, 2014). Hegel, the author of this view, criticized Rousseau’s insistence for a unity of purpose at the heart of political life, and argued that the assumption that all humans share some pre-social identity ends up granting citizens nothing more than token equality. In this regard, Hegel’s insight was to conceptualize selfhood as being dependent on recognition (Häkli & Kallio, 2014; McQueen, 2015). In contrast to the self as something antecedently given, Hegel 3 | PINS [Psychology in Society] 53 • 2017 argued that the self emerges, as both a political subject and moral agent, through a process of recognition by the “other” (McQueen, 2015). As he famously asserted, “self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’” (Hegel, 1807 as cited in McQueen, 2015: 53). If the self’s very existence and capacity for agency is extrinsically (as opposed to intrinsically) determined, so it follows that one’s political identity is contingent upon both receiving and conveying affirmative modes of recognition (McQueen, 2015). In sharp contrast, Nietzsche and Lacan have provided the groundwork for the postmodern conception of identity and selfhood, which was especially influential in 20th century political theory (Heyes, 2014). Nietzsche’s conception of the self discloses it as a radically historical and cultural entity (McQueen, 2015). For Nietzsche, there is no metaphysical entity lurking beneath
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